


the red, orange, and pink symphony

by The_Wavesinger



Category: Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through - Meat Loaf (Music Video)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 09:22:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20946017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger
Summary: The sun rises; the sun sets. Andros has always travelled back; he will always travelled back. He has no choice.





	the red, orange, and pink symphony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [indigo_inks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigo_inks/gifts).

When the time comes, Andros knows what to do.

He’s lived and breathed for this moment, for so long now. They all have, in one way or another, tension and anticipation and hope and uncertainty. What if, what if, what if, thrumming through their veins, in the way they talk to each other and look at each other and kiss and fuck and laugh and love.

What if, what if, what if. What if, and if it all goes wrong, if it all goes right. It’s a circle, in a way, and Andros has lived it for so so long.

—

When he was a boy, he tried to escape it. This gift he was born with, this curse and power and magic, everything he wanted and didn’t want in the palm of his hand. The universe was too wide for a scared child. The universe is too wide, still, for a grown man, but he’s learned to tread carefully, to box it and hold it piece by piece until it’s not such a drowning morass.

Still, now, he stands on the edges of the abyss, looking finally into its maw, and he understands that boy better than he did before.

—

Miriam whispers her secret into his ear, and he holds it.

He doesn’t understand her, even now, floating between the sharp-love-loss-grief-hope-hurt of her family and the crackling warmth and the shifting wind-crazed night of their group as easily as a snake shedding skin, the tendrils of her power, her love and faith and belief, wrapped around her palm and heart for the world to see, yet turning away when they reach for her.

But Miriam gives him her heart, wrapped in soft cloth and bleeding and bloodied with knife-strokes. Andros may not understand, but he’ll protect it all the same.

—

There are so many of them, so many secrets and friendships and families and entire lives, and there’s a moment where he thinks, I should leave, maybe—

But no.

He made his choice, long ago, and he’s sticking by it. He knew, then, the way the others wouldn’t, the way they still don’t, will never, maybe. He made his choice, through his blood-soaked lonely dreams, and here he is, standing on the edge, everything he thought would happen coming to pass, and he has no-one to blame but himself.

The ritual demands sacrifice. _Earthmother, listen._

Andros makes the first cut.

—

“If you don’t want to,” Miriam had said, the two of them out on the boulevard alone, “none of us would hold it against you.”

She says that, and yet.

Andros reads the cards. He knows Miriam, doesn’t need anything, any prop, to know her, and she is surety because she is right, for herself.

The others—

Andros made that choice, the one that didn’t lead to himself bleeding on the streets, all of this over. They are his responsibility now.

“I made my choice, Miriam,” Andros had said, and refused to say anything else. What would be the point?

—

He still wakes up lying dead in alley, stabbed in the back by someone who seduced him with pretty words and violence and killed him with the same. He knows it’s coming. He knows it’s always coming, and somehow, still, he doesn’t understand.

That younger him, the person who made that choice—he’s almost afraid to look him in the eye, now. To see what he’ll see, to know what he’ll know. They’re so different, and yet Andros can feel himself falling, falling, and it’s a siren-call and a lure and the younger him couldn’t possibly have known, but—

Breathe.

—

Miriam’s red-rope anchor is what is tying him here. Everyone else he loves and cares for and still, she was the first who found him and the first he’ll find, and they have that going for each other.

And she has known the bright, echoing pain of too many people’s agony entwined in your own, and at the very least she can brace herself and cut him off if it becomes too much, anchor him if it doesn’t.

This has always been held between them, late night phone-calls and eyes meeting across the room, and, he hopes, it’ll be enough.

—

Sometimes, he listens to his heart beat.

It’s a strange sound, _lub-dub_, in out, almost but not quite perfectly constant. The wonder of it is that he doesn’t fly to fragile pieces, lost and frightened, then and there, that every part of him is still knit together defying fate beyond all odds, and yet fate’s master and lord.

He presses his feet into wet sand, and lets the ocean wash over him. The rhythm is almost superimposed on his heartbeat, tattooing future and past and present into his brain.

_You are them. They are you. But you have a choice._

—

They chose the old factory not out of sentiment (all of them young and old, and there’s enough sentiment to bless a few dozen worlds, maybe, but that’s what they need) for the privacy and how far away it is from humanity, from everything that could stop this. That could stop them.

They made a choice, all of them, for him, and he has been stuck in that loop ever since. Maybe, maybe—

“Too late for maybes,” he tells Miriam lightly. She understands at least a little bit what he’s going on about, squeezes his hand. “It never is, Andros.”

It always is. He wants to stay, to draw this out, to linger in this moment forever and avoid what he can only think of as a duty and an obligation (and maybe a hope, but that’s—no).

And yet.

On the other side of the dance of fire and pain, his younger self is waiting for him. There’s still that one chance in a million that he can’t predict, a butterfly fluttering its wings in a completely unpredictable way setting a wave of unpredictability into motion, a tantalizing glimpse of whatever lies beyond. He has no choice.

He jumps.


End file.
